Friday, May 18, 2007

A Sweet Fiddle Tune

Thursday, May 17, 2007

Next project

With the master's thesis behind me, I'm moving on to the next project: Moving. We closed on the new house Friday and will be making the big haul across town tomorrow. 

Here are a few shots of the upstairs as it looked earlier this year: First February and then March and early April. That's my brother-in-law Chris in the gas mask. Our contractors, John Duesler (walls and trim) and Steve Maxson (electrical) and Jeff Shaver (floors), did great and fast work. Stay tuned for current photos of the new, improved 7 Prindle Ave.  

Thursday, May 3, 2007

Mission accomplished

After about a year (on and off, mostly on) of intense intellectual and creative labor, I submitted my master's thesis on Monday. Three days later, it still hasn't sunk in that I'm done. Maybe that's because I'm still working full-time as a newspaper editor as well as teaching journalism two nights a week ... perhaps I need a full weekend to unwind.

One of the first things I did after turning in the manuscript (88 pages, but who's counting?) was to go to the library and return a crate full of books I had been using for my research and inspiration. Of course I couldn't leave the library empty-handed, so I grabbed a small stack of new books. It's great to be able to read purely for pleasure again. I suspect, however, that my idea of "pleasure reading" has evolved a bit over the last three years. I picked up books of essays by Andrei Codrescu, poems by Gerald Stern, illustrated fiction by Charles Bukowski with R. Crumb, and a novel by Johnathan Lethem. I selected them based on how little they resembled the material I was reading for the thesis ...

Folks are always asking what my thesis was about, and I'm tired of trying to explain it in 50 words or fewer, so here is an excerpt from the abstract that sums it up as briefly as possible:

In her essay "On Place in Fiction," the Southern writer and photographer Eudora Welty wrote, "It is both natural and sensible that the place where we have our roots should become the setting, the first and primary proving ground, of our fiction. Location, however, is not simply to be used by the writer – it is to be discovered … Discovery does not imply that the place is new, only that we are."

 

Knowing Home: Short Fiction from Fulton County, N.Y. is a collection of five short stories set in the writer's home region, which straddles the Mohawk Valley and Adirondack Foothills of New York State. The collection isintroduced with a critical essay that combines personal narrative and scholarship about the ways location interacts with culture, economics and identity, and how these interactions apply to the writer's own fiction and modern American realistic fiction in general.

The essay also briefly investigates how these interactions are eminent in "Mohawk," the first published novel by Richard Russo. The novel's setting is a nominally fictionalized town resembling Gloversville, N.Y., which was Russo's "first and primary proving ground" and is immediately adjacent to this writer's hometown, Johnstown.